Staging Migration and Post-National Identities:
The Performance of Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Europe

Iranian-Swedish playwright and director Farnaz Arbabi discusses the performance of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Europe with members of Lotta Gavel-Adams’ Drama seminar.

In the past couple of years her work has awakened political and cultural debate and secured some of Sweden’s most prestigious theater awards. In her 2006 adaption of the literary classic The Emigrants, she recasts Vilhelm Moberg’s epic of 19th-century immigration to America as a narrative of today’s immigration to Sweden. Her production of Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s play Invasion! (2006) deals with questions of ethnicity and identity among first-generation young people whose parents immigrated to Sweden.

In 2007, she produced Normal for Camp X theatre in Copenhagen, a devised work about sexuality and sexual identity among teenagers. This year, she directed the musical Hedwig and The Angry Inch for Stockholm City Theatre. In her talk, Arbabi will show filmed clips from her productions and discuss recurring themes in her work: identity, ethnicity, gender, and alienation among minority groups in contemporary Europe.